Being an inhabitant of Canada’s largest city, crowds, traffic jams, and even protests come as no surprise to this long-time Toronto resident. Nevertheless, as the G20 summit rolls into the downtown core this weekend, the word “crowded” becomes an understatement as thousands infiltrate the streets, including protesters and more than ten thousand police officers patrolling to protect the leaders of the world’s top twenty capitalist nations. It shouldn’t be a great shock to anyone that this June’s summit has been optimistically branded with the title “Recovery and New Beginnings”, as recovering from the recent recession will undoubtedly be the number one topic on the agenda. However, as the world’s economies have desperately struggled to regroup and reform following the financial meltdown of 2008, increasing numbers of individuals who have been hung out to dry by their respective governments have begun to question whether they truly will see a new beginning, and whether capitalism will be the system to bring it about for them.
Some members of TZM might think that the most important substance currently being extracted from and polluting the earth is oil, as corporations such as BP and Conoco Philips have various operations and drilling sites across the globe and will rally to send troops or other methods of persuasion to keep that drilling from expiring. But maybe we all need to take a closer look at other substances that demand extraction for products consumers find so popular and never think of where-from those substances come out of and how.
Karl Marx was right when he said that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Every power establishment eventually undergoes a downfall, of which the lower class takes advantage in order to improve their situation; in the most extreme cases, the action takes the form of a full-fledged revolution and in the not-so-extreme cases, they at least make themselves noticeable enough to make sure they are never again ignored.
Let us ponder and inspect the idea of a socio-economic paradigm shift, and plot a social direction with the help of social cybernation. Democracy, a loaded word, has a lot of connotations and ideologies associated with it; but what does it really mean? And, more importantly, how does it manifest in our current society? The ideological purpose of democracy is for everyone to participate–for the governing power to derive from the people. Unfortunately, when we inspect today’s culture and the governing institutions, this ideological premise is questioned.
